On September 20, 2016, police officers in Charlotte, North Carolina, arrived at the apartment complex of a forty-three-year-old black man named Keith Lamont Scott. Searching for a different man with an outstanding warrant, the police happened upon Scott in his car, where they claim they saw a blunt and a gun. They ordered Scott out of his car, and when he got out, Officer Brentley Vinson fatally shot him, as Scott’s wife looked on, screaming in horror. He would
later say Scott was holding the gun they said they’d seen.
The shooting came on the heels of so many others like it—Michael Brown Jr., Philando Castile, Tamir Rice—that it went virtually unremarked that the police officer who killed Scott was also black. Devastated protesters gathered on the streets of Charlotte to cry out against another black life lost in a police-involved shooting. Facing off against rows of cops in riot gear, they chanted, “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and “Black Lives Matter!” They marched for three
days. Some of the protests turned violent, and another man lost his life.
These events, unfolding in a sequence that feels all too familiar to us now, seemed to encapsulate once again the grim reality of race relations in America in the twenty-first century: the hopeless division, the animosity, the disregard for black lives, and the distrust in police forces increasingly viewed as the law-and-order wing of white power. But forty miles northeast of Charlotte, God was trying to write another story...READ MORE
